“In the meantime, Draxen will be expecting me.” He walks over to the closet
and rummages through the clothes I’ve left in heaps on the floor, grunting in displeasure as he searches.
Once he finds what he’s looking for—a pair of breeches—he starts sliding off
the pair he has on, watching my reaction as he does so.
“Stop that,” I say, turning around quickly.
He laughs softly.
I should have kept calm, and I shouldn’t have turned around. If I had simply
shrugged as though it didn’t bother me at all, Riden wouldn’t have been so amused. He would have taken his clothes elsewhere, I’m sure of it. But it all started so suddenly that I was unprepared with a response. There’s nothing to do
about it now.
“When you’re confined to this room,” he says, “how do you expect me to be
able to change into clean clothes?”
“Go get dressed in Draxen’s room!” I snap.
“Where’s the fun in that?”
I exhale angrily as I wait for him to finish. I listen to the rustling of cloth, the cinching of a belt, the thud of newly adorned boots smacking the floor—and I wait for it all to stop.
I’m listening so hard that I don’t even register that the boots are moving toward me until I feel a hand at my lower back.
His lips are at my ear. “It’s safe to look now, Alosa.” He brushes his lips across the side of my head before leaving.
I don’t realize how tense I am until my whole body relaxes.
* * *
I suppose I should be bored out of my mind during the next few days, but I’m
not. Riden comes into his room often to check on me. We talk until he tries to
morph the conversation into an interrogation. He wants to know things, like the
layout of my father’s keep, how often supply ships deliver shipments, how many
men guard the keep, and so on and so forth. I tell him none of these things. I will die before I give that information up. Well, actually they’d die, since I wouldn’t allow them to kill me.
I’ve noticed that Riden’s been keeping me at a distance. Still, he can’t help it
when I bait him during the conversation. It’s fun watching him struggle, trying
to find a balance with me. Toying with Riden is certainly more entertaining than
scouring the ship. I become a little more anxious each night that goes by without the map turning up. I check our heading frequently, gauging how much time is
left before I have to present the map to my father. We pass Lycon’s Peak and start sailing northeast.
It won’t be long now.
* * *
I wake early, even though I made it to bed late. I’m too worried to sleep
anymore, so I stare at the ceiling, thinking it all over in my head. I go over every spot I checked, searching for anything that may have been overlooked. My two
weeks are almost up. The checkpoint could show up on the horizon at any moment.
“You’re up early,” Riden says from where he lies next to me.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I say.
“Are you worried about something?”
“Actually, it was your snoring that kept me awake.”
He smiles. “I do not snore.”
“My ears beg to differ.”
He rolls onto his back, staring upward with me. “Tell me what’s worrying you.”
“Aside from the fact that I’m being held hostage by enemy pirates?”
“Yes,” he says simply, “aside from that.”
Well, I can’t very well tell him that either Draxen or his father hid a map somewhere and I can’t find it. Instead, I ask him, “What’s the most reckless thing you’ve ever done to try to impress your father?”
He’s quiet.
“Does it pain you to talk about him?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No, that’s not it. I try not to think about him because I
hated him so much.”
“I understand.” I wait to see if he’ll still answer my question.
He sighs. “It’s difficult to say. I did many reckless things.”
“Tell me one of them.”
“All right,” he says pensively. “Once, when we were sailing far out at sea, we
pillaged a ship before burning it down. My father dropped a chest of jewels into
the ocean while trying to haul it over to the ship. I dove in after it.”
“I think perhaps we should go over the meaning of reckless.”
“There were acura eels in the water, finishing off the sailors that survived the